Demanding or disrupting? Explaining differences and overlaps in strategic preferences within the climate change movement

Over the last decade, the climate change movement has known a strong diversification of its strategies for mobilizing around UN climate summits (COPs). Especially since the failed Copenhagen summit a central point of debate within the movement has become how actions should relate to the international policy process. While parts of the movement continue to believe that making claims towards government leaders at the COP can bring about sufficient solutions to the climate crisis, others have lost faith in the process and believe that any strategy that relies on the outcome of the COP is doomed to lead to disappointment. The latter still aim to use the momentum created by the COP, but propose a number of main alternative strategies: delegitimizing the COP process, building a movement for ‘what comes after’, direct action against the perceived ‘culprits’ of climate change, and the promotion of concrete solutions to the climate crisis. Although these different strategies do not necessarily contradict, and although the climate movement has somewhat reunited since its famous split around Copenhagen, different segments of the movement still compete for resources, and through that competition, differences in strategic preferences become salient. In some cases, these differences even lead to conflict or schisms. This paper aims to explain how such strategic differences ultimately drove the internationally coordinated mobilization of the climate movement for COP21 (Paris, 2015). Moreover, it asks to what degree organizers who wanted to draw attention away from the official climate negotiations were successful, given the uphill (media-) battle they had to fight. This paper combines 14 months of observations from meetings and actions with more than 40 qualitative interviews. Using these data, the study is able to trace exactly how the process leading to these mobilizations was shaped in the months of strategic negotiating preceding it. However, the movement’s strategic plans were heavily distorted when Paris was hit by terrorist attacks on November 13, just two weeks before COP21, and when the French authorities responded with a state of emergency which, among other things, put an initial ban on protesting. Dramatic as these impacts were, this situation will be an integral part of the study. As a theoretical framework, the paper starts from a political opportunity structure approach, assuming that variations in these strategic preferences can to an important extent be explained by variations in organizers’ perception of contextual opportunities. Nevertheless, other factors, like activist traditions, resources and decision making processes are taken into account as well. The paper aims to make a strong contribution to our understanding of strategic variations within the climate movement, the development of transnational mobilizations, and the role of POSs in these processes.